





































Microsoft Word - Butler-final.docx


[Expositions 8.1 (2014) 176–181]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
	

Cantor, Paul A. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American 
Film and TV. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 488 pp. $35.00 (cloth). 
ISBN: 978-0-813-14082-7. 

 
 
In the introduction to Paul A. Cantor’s The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. 
Authority in American Film and TV, Cantor, a Professor of English at the University of Virginia, 
makes a startling admission, although it is not clear that he sees it as such. Despite his book’s 
thematic organization, title, cover image of A. M. Willard’s The Spirit of ’76 with crudely 
superimposed faces of Cartman, Captain Kirk and John Wayne, and frequent disquisitions on the 
subject of freedom, The Invisible Hand is not actually about the interplay of liberty and authority 
in U.S. popular culture. Instead, his main goal “has been to identify and try to overcome the 
prejudices we have inherited from the tradition of Romanic aesthetics” (22). This tradition, 
which “has been anticommercial since its inception […] set[s] up the autonomous creative 
genius in opposition to the vulgarity of the marketplace.” His tactic in breaking down this false 
dichotomy between so-called high and low cultures, then, is to examine artifacts of popular 
culture—The Searchers, The X-Files, Star Trek, Mars Attacks! and South Park among them—for 
the ways they examine serious themes, which thus proves their artistic worth. By proving this 
artistic worth, Cantor hopes to redeem capitalism as a creative force for good from the 
descendants of the Frankfurt School who would seek to denigrate it. 

Those descendants are seldom named, and almost never quoted. The citation-free straw-
manning comes early and often in The Invisible Hand. It first arises in the book’s preface, in 
which Cantor speaks out against (and Red-baits) a cabal of unnamed cultural critics who “even 
when they are not strictly speaking Marxists […] adopt a Marxist position: that American pop 
culture serves the cause of capitalism,” and is thus “debased entertainment to numb the 
American people into submission” (xvi). Two hundred pages later, Cantor is still at it, accusing 
“the academic world, much of the media, and a large part of the entertainment business—
especially the Hollywood elite,” of harboring “anticapitalist views” (201). He provides as his 
sole evidence Ludwig Von Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, an essay from the era of black 
and white television that is itself long on assertion and short on evidence. 

Never made clear is who, outside of the most eldritch depths of tenured academe, still believes 
any of this. The wall between so-called high and low culture, dynamited by the postmodernists, 
has never fully been rebuilt. Research universities regularly host humanities conferences on 
science fiction, television, and video games. The cultural studies departments that Cantor 
lambasts are more likely to teach courses on “The Cyborg in The American Imagination” or 
“Vampirism as Metaphor” as anything else, and a quick glance through such bastions of high and 
middlebrow culture as The Paris Review, The New Yorker, or The New York Times Magazine 
will yield few articles about abstract dance, but plenty of pieces about Orange Is the New Black 
and getting high at Disneyland. Marxism is dead. Poetry is dead. Captain America, on the other 



177  Butler 
 

hand, is very much alive, thawed out of his iceberg just in time to rule the box office with a 
gentlemanly, democratizing fist.  

Cantor’s war for freedom, capitalism and the marketplace has already been won—one of the 
odder aspects of The Invisible Hand is that most of its cited works of criticism and theory are 
forty to fifty years old—yet the book seethes with grievance towards liberals, cultural critics, and 
oppressive entertainment gatekeepers. In his chapter on South Park, Cantor is so inspired by 
Trey Parker’s and Matt Stone’s mockery of the Hollywood Left that he writes that the Left “does 
not want people to have fun in any form, whether laughing at ethnic jokes or indulging in fast 
food.” But Cantor then uses Rob Reiner, the director of such fun-destroying works as This is 
Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride as his one example. Reiner’s crime, 
for the record, is his advocacy on behalf of increased cigarette taxes in the State of California.1  

This seeming contradiction—a deeply-held feeling of oppression coupled with a reality of 
triumph—underpins the two communities whose interests intersect in The Invisible Hand: 
Fandom (especially geek fandom) and the George W. Bush-era American Right. Both 
communities possess a historic grievance that was once based on reality. The obsessions of 
fandom—Marvel and DC comics, Star Wars and Trek, heroic fantasy in general, various 
animated television shows, etc.—were once widely derided by our culture. Similarly, during the 
Johnson Presidency—a time, not coincidentally, when many Bush-era conservatives came of 
age—people self-identifying as conservatives were reviled, particularly in academia. As Rick 
Perlstein points out in Nixonland, his social history of the 1960s, even Melvin Laird, who wrote 
Barry Goldwater’s convention platform, thought that refusing to tack Left on many issues would 
be “suicidal” to the Republican Party in 1965.2  

This feeling of oppression has persisted, however, even after both groups have proven 
triumphant. Hollywood studios would not survive today without superhero films, and Game of 
Thrones remains the most culturally important show on television. Meanwhile, The Walking 
Dead is so popular, a talk show about it that airs after each episode has higher ratings than most 
of NBC’s “Must See TV” line-up. In politics, our consensus has drifted so far to the Right that 
supposed liberal lion President Obama enacted the Heritage Foundation’s plan for universal 
health care, resisted heavier regulation of banks, and escalated Bush-era domestic espionage.  

Cantor, of course, is not exactly a conservative; he is a libertarian. But the libertarianism 
espoused in The Invisible Hand is indistinguishable from the socially liberal zones of the 
Republican Party in the 21st century. The book treats “political correctness” as a serious threat to 
liberty,3 but relegates its one brief mention of the PATRIOT Act to an endnote. The Republican 
Party is almost never criticized, and its anti-libertarian stances are treated with equivocation 
(“whatever one’s attitude may be regarding the rights and wrongs of immigration, it is a simple 
fact that the American people are deeply troubled by the issue” (304)), when they’re mentioned 
at all. Al Gore’s career-long advocacy on behalf of the environment is depicted as his “seiz[ing] 
on alarmist issues as a way of clinging desperately to [his] celebrity and feeding [his] vanity,” 
(134) while the book remains virtually silent about the Bush regime’s sanctioning of indefinite 
detention, extrajudicial assassination, and torture. 



Review of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture 178 
 

An author’s politics is his or her business and none of this would matter were it not for The 
Invisible Hand’s pesky habit of slipping into libertarian polemic. For Cantor often seeks 
reification within the foci of his obsessions. These fictive thought experiments are held up as 
qualitatively good when he believes they prove the hypotheses of doctrinaire libertarianism. 
Thus, The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s biopic of early career Howard Hughes, “becomes one of 
the great American motion pictures because it celebrates the freedom and the entrepreneurial 
spirit that made America great” (188). Meanwhile, South Park is to be lauded for its favorable 
depictions of Wal-Mart and Starbucks (205).  

This strain within The Invisible Hand actually places it well in line with a contemporary trend 
on the online Left: the abandonment of consideration of aesthetics and form in order to focus 
almost exclusively on plot and political content. In this kind of writing—found most frequently 
online—what matters about a work of narrative art is whether we agree with what we perceive it 
as saying. The process of viewing a television show or reading a book thus can devolve into a 
kind of checklist exercise wherein a work is to be judged according to its, well, political 
correctness.4  

With the exception of deliberate agitprop, art isn’t an argument, however, and in treating it 
solely on argumentative terms, criticism runs two risks. The first is stripping away everything of 
artistic value from art, shrinking it until it is roughly the size and scope of a college freshman 
composition essay. The second is misreading the work in question because its artistic power 
must be explained in ways that are comforting to the critic’s politics.  

Discovering and unpacking the politics of a work of art is an important endeavor, but it is 
most valuable when it expands our understanding rather than contracts it, complicating rather 
than simplifying. Hiding within The Invisible Hand is a much better book that seeks to plumb the 
contradictions, internal tensions, inconsistencies and impossibilities of art grappling with 
political issues. This better book is most clearly on display in Cantor’s masterful reading of John 
Ford’s The Searchers through The Oresteia, looking at how both examine the tension between 
lawlessness and order without ever comfortably settling on either solution for societal 
organization. Within Aeschylus’ nightmarish transition from familial structures, filial duty, and 
revenge to an organized society in which our Furies must be sublimated, Cantor finds a 
fascinating lens through which to view Ford’s classic Western. Cantor convincingly shows the 
tragedy and complexity of Ford’s vision, recognizing the necessity of civilization while 
remaining “troubled by what is lost in the civilizing process, as shown by the painful image he 
creates of [protagonist] Ethan [Edwards]’s exclusion from the very world he has labored so hard 
to protect” (56). 

This critical eye for complexity, this search for the illuminating tension, surfaces again in 
Cantor’s discussion of Gene Roddenberry’s work as a staff writer on Have Gun Will Travel and 
creator of Star Trek. In covering both of these television shows, Cantor accurately diagnoses a 
central tension of well-meaning, aristocratic liberalism, namely that it seeks to safeguard 
freedom and equality, but can only envision doing so through top-down management and 
authority. Cantor demonstrates how Star Trek in particular appears to be a celebration of liberal 



179  Butler 
 

UN-style internationalism, but rests on a protagonist whose actions are indistinguishable from 
imperialism. And while Cantor and I are unlikely to agree on much beyond our taste in 
television, his detailed analysis of how The X-Files reflects, embodies and performs late 
twentieth and post-9/11 American anxieties about globalism, immigration, and the loss of an 
essential American self is a must-read for anyone who seriously watches or would want to teach 
the show.  

Perhaps most emblematic of the ways the book’s three agendas—libertarian polemic, pop-
culture elevation, and incisive thematic critique—compete with and ultimately undermine each 
other in Cantor’s free market of ideas are the two essays on the work of Austrian director Edgar 
G. Ulmer. Both are chock-full of trenchant observations, cultural context, and fascinating finds. 
In particular, his look at The Black Cat—a horror-film-cum-meditation-on-post-Great-War-
Europe starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff—wonderfully takes the reader through Freud, 
Heidegger, Adorno, Mark Twain, Percy Bysshe Shelley, incest, war, American-abroad tropes, 
and Goethe without ever going off the rails. Here, for example, is his fascinating look at how the 
protagonists of the film (a honeymooning American couple who wind up spending much of the 
film unconscious) and the Europeans whose web they are drawn into are portrayed: 

 
The contrasts Ulmer develops between Europeans and Americans are not all to 
the advantage of the latter. To be sure, the Europeans in The Black Cat are deeply 
neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, and self-destructive, not to mention downright 
evil and even satanic, while the Americans are free, open, good-natured and 
optimistic. But at the same time the Europeans are clearly more interesting that 
the Americans. The Europeans are intelligent, cultured, and artistic, while the 
Americans are bland, prosaic, and more than a little obtuse. […] We are not 
convinced that the Europeans are better off for all their insights into the depths of 
human evil. They seem to have been corrupted by their encounter with evil, 
perhaps even driven insane. The Americans might be healthier for turning their 
backs on this glimpse into the heart of darkness. (235–7) 

 
Later on in the same essay, he turns to how The Black Cat enacts aristocratic continental 
European anxieties about American culture, and the way that “the decay of the aristocratic 
culture of Europe” is seen by Ulmer’s film (and Heidegger) as the inevitable result of 
democratization. The blandness of the Americans, then, is both their saving graces and “ominous 
[…] on a meta-level in the movie, American pop culture is obliterating European elite culture—
the mass-produced mystery novel is taking the place of the European Gothic tale” (241). 

Moving on to Ulmer’s seminal noir Detour, Cantor notes how the film is a deconstructive 
assault on the American Dream. Reading it as a dark nightmare of manifest destiny, Cantor 
shows how Ulmer takes the tropes of Hollywood fable (boy goes west in search of love and 
happiness, meeting strangers, acquiring material goods, and having adventures along the way) 
and upends them, thus showing how “the hero’s quest for happiness […] leads only to corruption 



Review of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture 180 
 

and eventually to his destruction” (244). Using the work of the Frankfurt School as his flashlight, 
Cantor spies how “the characters in Detour seem incapable of generating authentic desires. They 
are always setting their goals on the basis of the models that American society offers them” (250) 
and how these manufactured desires come to undo them.  

Unfortunately, this second essay about Ulmer is soon overwhelmed by tendentious 
assumptions about art, Detour, and the relationship between Europe and America. For example, 
Cantor wants to critique “Ulmer’s vision of America in Detour,” and the genre of noir in general 
by asking whether they provide a “truthful” and realistic portrait of American society (259). But 
he is unable to show that the goal of noir was ever to do so. Noir—a genre filled with stylized 
camerawork and lighting, larger than life characters, and pulpy, melodramatic plots—is not 
concerned with verisimilitude. Like The X-Files, noir is largely concerned with enacting our 
anxieties of what lies beneath American society, rather than a realistic portrayal of what 
American society is actually like.  

Cantor proceeds from there to question the genre’s validity because it was largely made by 
foreigners. “One must also wonder whether [many important noir directors’] status as aliens did 
not also work to color, cloud, and even distort their view of the United States” (260), he writes. 
A page later, he insinuates that noir is un-American because “many of the great noir films were 
directed by Europeans […] however American the subject matter of film noir may seem to be, it 
was often presented through European eyes behind the camera,” and thus that noir “may be one 
more example of a long tradition of European anti-Americanism, or at least a tendency to fault 
the United States for failing to measure up to European standards of civilization” (261). Oddly, 
given that The Invisible Hand wants to argue the marketplace’s validity as an arbiter of substance 
and quality, the book never stops to consider that hundreds of film noirs were made because the 
genre was popular with the very American people supposedly disliked by its directors, or the 
complexity of Ulmer using a pulpy genre picture to critique American mass culture.  

The Ulmer section of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture also reveals a final irony, one 
that points back to the book’s overall project. Cantor argues that capitalism is necessarily a force 
for good. It creates the abundant splendors of American mass culture, and allows individual 
artists to achieve fulfillment and greatness, no matter how trying their struggles with the system 
might be. He praises the widely derided second half of Tim Burton’s career for its financial 
successes, and writes of Ulmer’s career: 

 
[T]he fact that the Hollywood Ulmer came to despise nevertheless made it 
possible for him to make two films by which he is remembered today as an artist 
suggests that America does not break all its promises to it immigrants […] 
Ulmer’s career illustrates just about every obstacle that can stand in the way of 
artistic achievement in commercial culture, and yet ultimately it is a tribute to the 
ability of a talented and determined individual to be creative in any system of 
production. In the end, the aesthete from the Alps managed to fulfill himself as 
the king of the B-movies. (222)  



181  Butler 
 

What, then, are we to make of The Invisible Hand’s existence? For the marketplace has no use 
for this book. Its existence is only possible because of a network of government-supported 
nonprofit universities have forgone the principles of the free market in order to support important 
scholarship for the benefit of society. Perhaps Cantor, then, is right. Universities are hotbeds of 
anti-capitalist sentiment. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture’s very existence is living proof.  

 
ISAAC BUTLER 

Parabasis 
 
 

Notes 

1. South Park is indeed a satirical work of libertarian agitprop—and a hilarious and 
frequently brilliant one at that—but this is noteworthy in light of Cantor’s jeremiad 
against humorless liberals because American comedy is dominated by liberals and often 
comes from a generally progressive point of view. During the time that South Park has 
been on the air, Comedy Central has also aired Chappelle’s Show, Key & Peele, The 
Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Inside Amy Schumer, among 
others, all of which have a solidly left-of-center point of view. 
 

2. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New 
York: Scribner, 2008), 7. 

 
3. Like the libertarianism it advocates for, The Invisible Hand has a serious blind spot when 

it comes to race. Beyond Cantor expressing that not being able to tell ethnic jokes in 
polite company is an assault on freedom, the book is often silent when it comes to racial 
matters, except for a brief ode to how the free market will make all races able to get along 
in its chapter on Deadwood. 
 

4. For an incisive jeremiad against this kind of writing, New York Magazine and 
rogerebert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz issues a plea for discussion of form here: 
http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/please-critics-write-about-the-filmmaking while my own 
short take on this issue can be found here: http://parabasis.typepad.com/ 
blog/2014/02/the-incredible-shrinking-artist.html. 


